The 20 best spy novels of all time

When the young David Cornwell, an intelligence officer working for MI6, published his pseudonymous third novel, it was hailed as the first work of fiction to present the business of espionage as it really was. Le Carré himself would say that this was precisely what the book didn’t do. As he once told me: “My service passed it, on the grounds it was not reflective of the truth, and gave away no secrets.” It is better regarded as a great feat of imagination. Although le Carré has written many fine novels in the ensuing half-century, he has never quite recaptured anything as thrillingly transgressive as the cynicism of his anti-hero Leamas, who describes the rest of the Secret Service as “people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives”.